Chapter 6 #2
“I thought the walk might loosen it,” he groaned, looking down. “Maybe you’re right.”
“I am?”
“What if I just reach down and rip it off?”
“It could end this faster.”
“Or I’ll pass out, collapse on you, pin you under my weight, and we’ll both die because I bought a cheap lemur costume and got my scrote caught in it.”
Rachel looked at her engagement ring.
“I am marrying a man who just uttered that sentence.”
For whatever reason, that is what made Kell reach down and yank.
Hard.
Then scream.
Harder.
The scream made Judy Labreque come rushing to the door in alarm. As the door opened and the tiny heart-shaped bell tinkled, Kell turned into a tomato of pain.
“What happened?”
“He’s having a zipper emergency,” Rachel said as calmly as possible.
Judy immediately looked at Kell’s crotch, as if she knew what zipper emergency meant.
“Oh, dear.” Her eyes got bigger when she saw the logo on Kell’s robe, gaze pinging between Kell and Rachel with dawning horror. “I thought you two were just onstage at the festival. Engagement, right?” She looked at Rachel’s left hand. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks.”
Judy cleared her throat with an emphasis Rachel could only think of as school-marmish, and said directly to Kell, “This zipper emergency is the bad kind? I am guessing your zipper is caught in a very sensitive place?”
“Yes, ma’am. The worst kind,” Kell moaned. Judy looked down and made a compassionate face, but it was clear she was also calculating the fair market value of this kind of gossip.
“And you need help?”
“Something like that.”
“No one at Love You Harder was willing to do the… deed?”
“Love You Harder? What do they have to do with this?”
Judy poked the logo on his chest.
“I wasn’t there! This is a robe Rachel had in the truck.”
Judy looked at Rachel, hands up defensively. “I don’t judge what people do privately. Your kink is yours and yours alone.”
“There is no kink!” Rachel huffed.
“Is this some masochism ritual gone wrong?” Judy whispered to Kell, who gave Rachel such a desperate, white-eyed look that she wanted to pick him up in her arms and carry him off into the woods.
Not that she could, but she wanted to.
Poor Kell stood up as straight as possible, the red satin sash dropping to the ground. “I need Anya.”
“Grandma? Why?”
“She can help me.”
A steady and extremely judgmental gaze was Judy’s response. One of her eyebrows cocked.
Rachel knew that look. She’d spent the last two years developing a sixth sense about it.
“Judy,” she said smoothly, pulling the woman aside. Lean and athletic, with the look of a gym teacher, Judy was sixty-three but looked a decade younger. She was also sharper than most people realized. “We need to be discreet here.”
“Can you tell me how it happened?”
“He was hot and trying to take the lemur costume off. The zipper was jammed up higher, around his neck. He used a little too much force and was lifting his hips off the front seat as he pulled, and, well… physics.”
“Lifting his hips, huh?” Judy winked. “At Love You Harder?”
Rachel remained stone faced. “In his truck.”
Just then, a shuffling sound caught Rachel’s attention, like dry leaves rustling of their own volition. A tiny, desiccated woman appeared, wearing a red, white, and black-patterned dress.
She looked at Kell.
“Man root hurt.”
He just swallowed and made a face that said kill me now.
“Zipper. Bad.” This was Anya. In her late nineties and an immigrant from Russia, she was Judy’s grandmother. Not mother.
Grandmother.
Kell had told Rachel the delightful story of how Anya had helped him in a pinch, when he’d asked Rachel out for their first dinner date and his old suit from his time in D.C. had needed to be tailored. Anya had come to the rescue and now, it seemed, that was a theme.
“I can’t believe how stupid I was,” Kell moaned, waddling into the shop, Judy escorting him to the back while giving Rachel eyes that said, What the hell?
“You stupid. Very stupid,” Anya agreed. She grabbed the lemur head and looked it over, her fingers assessing the fabric, mouth twisting down at the corners, nostrils flaring. “Stupid man.”
“The zipper was sticking even back at home. Mom put soap on it and did her zipper magic, but...”
“No one can fix.” Anya yanked on the top half of the costume, turning Kell beet red as he tried to rebalance himself and avoid pain. “This bad quality. Why you buy bad quality?”
“I was in a rush, Anya. I needed it in two days.”
“I do better than this in two days. Make from scratch.”
“I didn’t know!”
Beady eyes, narrowed to slits, with no eyelashes but more than enough contempt, were aimed straight at Rachel’s fiancé.
“You knew. You just stupid,” she spat out. Rachel didn’t like how mean the old lady was being, and was about to defend Kell when she realized this wasn’t meanness.
This was hurt.
Anya’s feelings were hurt that Kell hadn’t included her in the big engagement plan he had.
“Can you help me? Please?” Kell begged. Rachel nearly laughed at how this had gone from bizarre to absurd, poor pain-ridden Kell being chewed out by someone born before movies had sound, but her mom began texting her again.
When she looked at the phone, though, her stomach sank. It wasn’t Portia.
Worse.
It was Deanna.
How could she explain this to Kell’s mom? Talking about his penis wasn’t exactly casual conversation with her future mother-in-law.
And then Rachel’s phone rang.
“Hi, Deanna.”
“Where are you guys? This Chloe woman is going on about how her bichon frisé will need more pet psychiatrist time if she’s even five minutes late, Portia is begging Stan for something called ketamine microdosing, and we’re all out of ranch dressing. Can you pick some up on your way home?”
The laugh burst out of her like a loud clap. Kell jolted.
“Of course we can. Is that why you called?”
Deanna sighed. “I don’t know what you two are doing, but it must be important. We’re here and we’ll still be here when you’re ready. I’m sure Chloe is very good at what she does and can photoshop you two into engagement photos you weren’t actually there for.”
Ah, reality. She loved how Deanna lived in realityland.
“NO! DON’T YANK IT!” Kell bellowed in the background as a stoic Anya began tugging on the costume. “IT HURTS! THAT’S MY SAC!”
“Is that my Kell yelling like that?” Deanna asked in an amused voice. “Whatever’s going on–wow. I’m butting out now. Uh, take as long as you, um, need. Bye, Rachel!”
The scramble to end the call left Rachel standing in the back room of Labrecque’s, staring at her phone, her cheeks bright red.
Deanna thought she was… doing something… to Kell’s–
Oh, dear.
“I fix dis,” Anya said bluntly.
“How?” Kell said with a heaping dose of suspicion, cupping his hands over his painful parts.
“Vodka.”
“Vodka?” he rasped, voice going low. “I wouldn’t mind a shot right now.”
Moving slowly but with purpose, Anya reached into the pocket of her dress and hauled out a sizable flask. She twisted it open, the cap turning into a shot glass, and handed it to him.
“Drink.”
As Kell did just that, Anya looked at Rachel’s hand, then stared into her soul. “You say yes?”
“Of course.”
“Then his man root hurt?”
“My man sac, technically,” Kell muttered, as if the difference mattered.
Clearly, it did to him.
“I didn’t hurt his man root! I hadn’t even touched his man root!”
Anya made a sound in the back of her throat, rolled her eyes, and pointed. “You no virgin.”
How would she even know?
“Look, Anya, whatever you’re planning to–”
Kell’s words were cut off with a squeak as Anya poured the rest of the vodka right onto his man root, then reached down and yanked hard, instantly releasing Kell from his imprisonment.
The scream that came out of him rivaled Audrey Luna’s high A in The Exterminating Angel at the Met.
Clucking, Anya held the cheap lemur costume in her hands, a string of Polish coming out of her that had to be mostly profanity as she peeled it down his body, grabbing his feet and pulling as he gasped.
“Why you not come to me for dis?” she repeated, shaking it in Kell’s face. Without asking, she threw the costume straight into a large trash can.
Then she spat on it.
“I–” Kell seemed incapable of words, breathing through his nose in patterns that indicated he was seeing dimensions Rachel would never know.
“All furries come to me,” Anya declared, shaking the flask to determine how much was left.
“Excuse me?” Rachel choked out.
Anya shrugged as she took a swallow. “I no judge. You have sex on her as furry. Okay.”
“We’re not furries!” Rachel said in a high shriek.
"Furries, dey all come to me for costumes. I put in special Velcro so dis zipper problem not happen." Anya shook her head sadly, then held out her hand. “Stupid. Stupid zipper. Dat fifty dollar.”
“Fifty!” Kell was suddenly capable of speech.
“Ten for time, ten for danger, five for vodka.”
“That’s only twenty-five!”
“The rest to shut up.”
Suddenly, Rachel had mad respect for Anya. The next time she needed leverage to push an initiative through in Luview, she was coming by Labrecque’s first.
With a bottle of good Polish vodka and plenty of cash.
Rachel pulled Kell into a hug as he examined his crotch gingerly, Anya shuffling out, then returning with a soda can. She thrust it at him.
“I’m not thirsty, but thank you.”
“Not to drink.”
“Excuse me?”
Instead of explaining, she demonstrated, one hand going to his waist, the other shoving the cold can under his underwear as Kell stood six inches higher, head nearly banging on the ceiling.
“It reduce. Men no like reduce, but it make not hurt.”
“I get it, Anya. Cold helps with the swelling.”
“Yes. Swelling you no have if you come to me for costume. I make good furry costumes. Holes in all the right places.”
“I–no! We’re not furries.”
Anya winked. “I make them red, white, and pink. Very popular at Love You Harder.” Her eyes settled on the logo on the robe Kell wore, and it all clicked.
Oh, no.